New York City is amongst the most populated cities in the world with about 8.6 million people (2017). It is also the melting pot of America with representation from all races.
We came across many articles speaking about racial segregation in NYC. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/nyregion/segregation-nyc-affordable-housing.html refers to how the city’s policy of giving preference to local residents for new affordable housing helps perpetuate racial segregation. As per https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html, NYC public schools are still struggling with racial segregation.
We were curious to look at demographic data to find out the racial distribution of population in New York City to help answer the following questions:
We found multiple datasets are available for demographic and race data. We chose to focus on the following datasets :
https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?g=0400000US36&q=New%20York
Census data is collected every 10 years (decennial survey). Last survey was conducted in 2010.
The other alternative survey peformed by sampling the population is the American Community Survey (ACS), performed yearly. The datasets available from ACS are either yearly or average of past 5 years. The 5 year average is considered the most reliable. We choose to use the 2013-2017 5 year average data for our study.
The ACS data contains population numbers for the following races
We found choroplethr packages to map population by demographics to boroughs and zipcodes on a choropleth map of NYC.
Choropleth maps allow us to make comparisons before data corresponding to geographical areas spatially. The borough maps were useful to get a sense of where each race was concentrated at the Borough level.
Observations from Borough Choropleth maps:
Choroplethr maps by zip code allowed us to identify clusters of zip codes where each race was concentrated.
Observations from Choropleth maps By Zipcodes:
We noticed that Zipcodes in NYC have unique patterns per Borough:
We can get a sense of racial concentration by borough by plotting the populations per race against the sorted list of Zip Codes.
Observations from Bar Plots Per Zipcode for Individual Races:
Next we compared the populations between races across all the zip codes. This was to identify if there was a larger concentration of any one race wrt others across the zipcodes in NYC.
Observations from Stacked Bar Plots Per Zipcode:
Next we studied each neighborhood in NYC as per neighborhoods listed here - https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendix/neighborhoods.htm
The goal was to find neighborhoods where populations from one race dominated.
Observations about Neighborhoods in Bronx:
Observations about Neighborhoods in Brooklyn:
Observations about Neighborhoods in Manhattan:
Observations about Neighborhoods in Queens:
Observations about Neighborhoods in Staten Island:
https://dlab.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/training_materials/Census_Lecture_030915.pdf https://rdrr.io/cran/choroplethr/man/county_choropleth_acs.html https://arilamstein.com/creating-zip-code-choropleths-choroplethrzip/ https://www.trulia.com/blog/tech/the-choroplethr-package-for-r/